Generally, a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) or a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is used to record television programs. These devices have capacity to store 100s of hours of media in standard formats on secure hard disks in the device itself. There can be multiple such devices at home for example one in living room and one in bed room. Recently, there has been a shift to having cloud based recordings (cloud DVR) for television content which is then streamed to a Set Top Box (STB) or other mobile devices that the user owns. In view of the above, there exists a problem for managing the storage of recordings optimally across multiple recording devices at home and cloud.
The existing recording systems schedule and record programs either locally on a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) of a user specified/user owned Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) device or on the network storage in the cloud based on user request for recording initiation. Each user or account may be given an allocation of storage capacity in these storage devices (either local or remote) and when a user requests to record an upcoming program, the content server can record the program in the active storage device, consuming a portion of the user's allocation in that active storage device. Typically, there are various passive recording options available to users to manage the recording storage space such as “delete at a time”, delete oldest recordings, First in First out (FIFO), large size items first etc. These options are set up manually by the user, and are associated per recording on a device and are used by the device to manage the space within itself. There is a finite amount of storage space available in the user device allocated for recording and there are operational costs for service provider involved in claiming additional storage space in the cloud. Due to the easier availability in high quality formats such as HD, 4K and existence of multiple copies of content for different device profiles and content explosion, the storage space can get easily exhausted.
Moreover, the current storage space management systems and policies are passive in nature. They are based on the recording options listed above. The onus is largely on the user to manually set appropriate record options for recording and for storage management. The user can also invoke a service option to choose what programs user wishes to retain vis-à-vis remove from storage either when the user chooses them specifically or if the storage space crosses a threshold value which is near the full capacity of the device. These methods involve user actions for storage space which might get burdensome on user. There can also be variations in storage policies and user experience across CPE devices (local) and cloud/network storage (remote) as well as differences in the devices available to user across time. These can be confusing for user to understand and use the devices optimally.
Also, there is minimal or no intelligence in the recording space management between the local recording storage(s) within the home and cloud storage. For instances, content which are not popularly viewed are not compacted and moved to the cloud, while content that is popular even if it is initially stored in the cloud, are not moved into the local storage for better viewing performance. This impacts the recorded content viewing experience for the end user.
The issues mainly faced in the video recording devices are to manage and utilize the storage space dynamically in each of the video recording devices (CPE devices and cloud devices) thereby improving the overall quality of video viewing experience for the end user.